The Distant Land of My Father (20 page)

Two weeks after Pearl Harbor came the most ominous development yet: in the middle of the night, the Japanese Gendarmerie appeared at the homes of some twenty Allied nationals and arrested them on the spot. No one knew why they were taken, no one knew where they went, and for several weeks, no one heard a thing. They had simply disappeared. Then Will Marsh told my father that he’d heard they’d been taken for questioning to a place called Bridge House, Gendarmerie Headquarters now, an old apartment building on the north side of Soochow Creek. More arrests followed, and soon it was rumored that Bridge House was filled with both Chinese and foreigners, some of whom had been there for many months. There were Chinese boys who couldn’t be over fifteen years old, American missionaries, well-known British and American journalists and businessmen. The head of the China agency for Dodge cars and trucks, the president of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, the managers of the National City Bank, the Socony Vacuum Oil Company, the Singer Sewing Machine Company. Those who were taken were often not seen again. And if they were, they were not the same, and they never spoke of what had happened to them during their imprisonment.

My father responded to the changes around him in kind. Before registering at Hamilton House, knowing that afterward would be too late, he had left the Medhurst and rented a room over a rice and grain shop near the intersection of Hardoon and Avenue Roads in the western part of the International Settlement, about a mile from the center of the city. The apartment was in a residential section on the corner of a busy street, with a main streetcar line passing the door. Rent was cheap, though for good reason: during every heavy rain, that whole section of Avenue Road and Hardoon Road flooded until it became a lake. The shopkeeper was honest, and warned my father that at times there would be more than a foot of water in his shop. No matter, my father said, the place was perfect, first because it was practical—the grain and rice shop below would come in handy should leaner days come—and second because it was unremarkable. He had decided that his best strategy was a low profile.

Once he and Jeannie were settled in his small room, he took stock of what he had. He was poor, but so was everyone else, and a new black market was thriving. People sold china and silver, glassware and jewelry, Chesterfield overcoats and cloche hats, silver hand mirrors and silk scarves. My father sold his Norfolk jacket and his radio. With the cash, he bought as much nonperishable food as he could, tins of fruit and meat and crackers. He’d decided that canned goods were an investment as well as a staple. The price of food had doubled after Pearl Harbor, but at least it was available, a situation he suspected was temporary.

He traded his homburg hat for two white pigeons. In a small corner of the cramped yard behind the grain shop, he built a chicken house on stilts, fenced the coop with split bamboo, and locked it with a padlock he got for a pair of leather shoes. The peddler who bartered with him for the padlock said it had come from a German submarine.

The pigeons proved to be a good business venture. They began to lay eggs within a few weeks, and my father talked the owner of the rice and grain shop downstairs into giving him the shop’s sweepings at the end of the day for a few eggs, so the birds didn’t cost much to keep. My father was vigilant about their care, always feeding and watering them on schedule, gathering eggs as though they were treasure. In heavy rains, fearing the fowl might get out and drown, he rolled up his trousers and went out into the night after them, then brought them in and dried them next to the small stove.

Early in 1942, in yet another proclamation, the Japanese ordered all Allied nationals to turn in any motor vehicles they owned at a place and time specified in the
Shanghai Times,
which had become the Japanese mouthpiece. The proclamation didn’t affect most people’s transportation. The Japanese had taken over all gas stations, and gas had become a rare commodity. My father hadn’t driven his Packard in months. He’d talked a German veterinarian friend of his, Dr. Adler, into letting him store it in his garage in the French Concession. Every few weeks, my father went by to start it up. When he sat at the wheel, he closed his eyes and breathed in the car’s familiar smell of soft leather and patchouli, and he imagined that nothing had changed, that he was headed toward Hungjao, and that my mother and I would be waiting for him, her with a tumbler of Scotch, me with narcissus from the garden and tales of my day at school.

But keeping the car was no longer a choice. He didn’t have enough gas to drive the car to the Race Course, where he was to turn it in, so he hired coolies to push it. A few days later he traded his gold watch for a bicycle, gritting his teeth so as not to spoil the deal, amazed at what he was doing. The watch had been a gift from his father, but he saw no other choice. The buses no longer ran, the streetcars couldn’t begin to handle the city’s needs, and rickshaws and pedicabs were ridiculously expensive. A bike was the only way to get around, and soon there wouldn’t be any to buy. The thing was to keep going, to do whatever needed to be done next, and not to step out of line.

Spring and summer brought temperatures that were warm, then hot. The city was more and more crowded, with refugee camps of straw huts covering every bit of vacant land. Street-cleaning was a thing of the past. The streets and pavement were filthy, and beggars were everywhere. The currency depreciated, prices rose, and my father kept looking for ways to cut back. He changed the electric bulbs in his room to two- or three-watt bulbs and got rid of the bulbs altogether where he could. He ate only what was native: fresh produce, rice, grains, nothing imported. Eventually he narrowed his diet down to cornmeal, which was cheap and easy to get. He baked it, boiled it, fried it, whatever he could think of, never mind the twenty pounds he’d lost since occupation. Even Jeannie’s ribs showed.

The only cause for hope, the thing he thought of at night as he waited for sleep, was the possibility of repatriation. It seemed impossible that the home governments wouldn’t send ships to take their citizens home. There were far more Japanese in Canada, the United States, and around the world than there were Allied nationals in Shanghai. Surely an exchange was bound to be arranged.

And then he heard from Will Marsh that negotiations were progressing. News spread that the date had been set, and people were elated. Then came the news that the numbers had been fixed, and everything seemed far less certain. Repatriation ships would stop first at ports in Japan, then in Hong Kong, then at other ports in China. There were only so many spaces for British, Dutch, Belgian, and American nationals, and most of those would go to embassy and consular staffs. When Will Marsh told my father the number of passengers from China that would be allowed, my father nodded grimly. The number was low. And then another blow: the Japanese would have some say in who left and who remained.

Fewer than two hundred spots were reserved for Shanghai residents, grossly out of proportion to the enemy nationals in Shanghai versus those in other ports. The names of embassy and consular officials were followed by inmates at Bridge House, employees of the Chinese government, semi-officials like members of Customs and the Municipal Council, those deemed valuable to the war effort, doctors, the sick and aged. My father was none of those.

The repatriation ship was the
Kamakura Maru,
but my father and others soon called it the
Wangle Maru.
The stories of bargaining and favoritism were appalling. The embassy and consular list included temporary and part-time employees, which meant that a secretary who worked perhaps fifteen or twenty hours a week was guaranteed a spot. There were rumors of out-and-out bargaining, the most blatant of which concerned a rich and socially well-connected woman who was given passage as the nurse to the children of the British Consul General.

The list-making went on for weeks. Finally on Friday, August 14, passengers were called and told they would be allowed to sail the following Tuesday.

That Tuesday was a sweltering summer day, even for Shanghai. At the wharf at Pootung, repatriates were checked through. The process took five hours. As officials stood under corrugated iron roofs, passengers lined up, handing over their papers to be checked and rechecked, carrying their baggage, saying good-bye to friends. My father said yet another good-bye. Will Marsh was on the list.

Within a few weeks of the
Kamakura Maru
’s departure, all talk of repatriation stopped. Soon there was another proclamation: Allied civilians were required to wear armbands. Once again my father stood in line, this time at the Japanese Consulate, where he was given a red armband with an
A
for American and the number 27. He was required to wear it on his left arm at all times, so that he could be distinguished from non-enemy nationals—the Germans and Italians and Vichy French. The penalty for not wearing the armband was significant: a stay at Ward Road Jail, a possibility more ominous than ever since the repatriation of embassy and consular officials. It was common knowledge that questioning now included torture.

Enemy nationals were next denied entrance to all forms of amusement—the cinemas, the theaters and clubs, the public rooms in hotels—but no one had much money anyway. Then British and American films were banned. The Chinese went to what had been the British theaters in large numbers, where they saw old German and French films as well as Chinese and Japanese productions, after which they watched footage of Pearl Harbor and other Japanese fronts in Asia and elsewhere, and were encouraged to applaud Japan’s victories.

In late October of 1942, my father found the completely unexpected in his postbox: an uncensored letter from California with a draft for fifty American dollars. It was from my mother and somehow, for no reason my father could explain, had found its way to him. Letters and Red Cross forms came through only rarely, although he occasionally heard news of us through friends. The fifty U.S. dollars were worth ten times as much as they would have been a few months earlier. My mother had sent it on impulse, reasoning that it couldn’t hurt. My father paced in his room for almost an hour, trying to decide where to hide it, and finally settled on the place behind the loose brick near the door of his room.

He was at a low point. He was thin and worn down, his nerves were shot, he startled easily. Stealing was the latest problem, and by then many of his belongings, practical and otherwise, had disappeared: his overcoat hanging on a peg near the front door, a sack of walnuts he’d bought from a street vendor, his aluminum pots and pans from the kitchen shelf, except for one small pot that had been filled with hot soup on the stove. Thieves took the brass pendulum from a small clock near his bed, which they apparently realized was not solid brass, but hollow, for my father found it later in the mud by the side of the road. He periodically found that clothes, boots, socks, even undergarments had been taken. The split bamboo fence he’d put in around the pigeon coop was stolen. He eventually took to sleeping with anything he cared about or couldn’t imagine losing: the drawer holding his knives and forks, his last aluminum pot, all of it stuffed under the bed except for the bicycle, which he padlocked to the headboard with a heavy chain and padlock. But then, finally, the pigeons were stolen.